Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes

With us philosophy is not practised as a private art, as it was by the Greeks, but has a public place, and should therefore be employed only in the service of the state.

When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.[Man muß, wenn von Freiheit gesprochen wird, immer wohl achtgeben, ob es nicht eigentlich Privatinteressen sind, von denen gesprochen wird.]

There is nothing which is not an intermediate state between being and nothing.

The true is the whole.

The plant brings forth its light as its own self in the blossom.

The owl of Minerva first begins her flight with the onset of dusk.

The life of God — the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things — may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.

The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.[Beginnende Bildung fängt immer mit dem Tadel an, vollendete aber sieht in jedem das Positive.]

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.[Die Weltgeschichte ist der Fortschritt im Bewußtsein der Freiheit.]

The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.

The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.

Personality is that which struggles to lift itself above this restriction and to give itself reality, or in other words to claim that external world as its own.[Sie ist das Tätige, sie aufzuheben und sich Realität zu geben, oder, was dasselbe ist, jenes Dasein als das ihrige zu setzen.]